Another Billion Monkey picture! But this time, what it illustrates is not anything notable in the way of Billion Monkey behaviour patterns. Billion Monkeys hold there cameras out in front of themselves. Unlike Real Photographers, who hold their Real Photographer cameras right up against their eyes. Big deal. You already knew that.

No, the point of this Billion Monkey snap is to talk about back lighting. I really like the way the sun creates a corona around everyone’s faces.

All of which is by way of an intro to this next picture. Moving from the mundane to the magnificent, here’s a photo of the planet Saturn, also back lit, taken not by me but by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft:

Click to get it bigger. Steven Pinker (scroll down to May 8th here - I got to this from here) complains that this snap has not received the media attention that it deserves. I think that perhaps the problem is that it is not only geeky science with nobody dying or getting divorced or anything, but that also, because of the back lighting, it looks rather fake. The effect of the back lighting is to make the solid bit of Saturn look like it has been plonked down on top of the rest of the photo. The thin corona around Saturn, presumably its back lit atmosphere, adds strongly to this impression, because it looks like the join. The rest of the photo is extraordinary, most notably the wispy stuff beyond the regular rings. But newspapers have enough problems with fake photos that they actually did fake themselves for them not to be wanting people to accuse them of having faked Saturn.